If you are a serial rapist and you need a safe base of operations, the nation’s capital city is the place for you. From the quiet corners of the District, you can set forth to the suburbs to carry out your heinous acts, or you can simply sexually assault someone down the street, return home, click on the TV, crack a beer and rest easy.
The chances you will be caught are nil.
No joke.
Being the father of three girls, I was sickened when I read my colleague Bill Myers’ Monday article that said D.C. may be harboring nearly a dozen rapists. Why? Because police and forensic scientists have failed to check DNA evidence that could link rapists to unsolved crimes.
“Detectives are now scrambling to build cases against the known offenders and to find the unknown men behind the DNA traces in the unsolved cases,” Myers wrote. The revelations might help solve rapes in Northern Virginia, Prince George’s County and D.C.
Based on sources and a memo circulating among criminologists, Myers reported that forensic technicians tested DNA samples from dozens of unsolved crimes and found nearly two dozen “hits,” or matches with an FBI database.
This unsettling news begs a bunch of questions. Where were the DNA samples? Why were they not tested earlier? How many more secrets and potentially crucial evidence lie sealed in untested crime scene materials?
The answer will not make you sleep easier. The District of Columbia does not have a crime lab. Does not exist. Never has. If police gather forensic evidence from a crime scene, it gets sealed up and stored and perhaps sent to an FBI lab in Virginia. If, and only if, the cops and prosecutors have a suspect, the FBI will process the evidence.
“It’s as if we were back in the 1950s,” says Kristopher Baumann, head of the police union. “All of our DNA evidence is sitting in an FBI lab. We are at their mercy.”
When a woman tells police she has been the victim of rape, she is taken to a hospital where doctors take physical evidence that might lead lawmen to the rapist. It’s called a rape kit.
“Three thousand untested rape kits are sitting in a warehouse,” Myers tells me.
This might explain why it took so long to find a suspect in the disappearance of Chandra Levy. Perhaps evidence against her alleged attacker is sitting in storage.
For decades federal prosecutors, the police foundation and the union have been lobbying for a crime lab in D.C. Plans languished for lack of interest or funding. A proposal to build a Consolidated Forensic Laboratory has been wending its way through the D.C. government since 2006.
“I’ve been enormously frustrated,” says Phil Mendelson, chairman of the D.C. Council’s judiciary committee. A strong lab advocate, he’s held hearings to push for construction. “The progress has been slothlike.”
Ground could be broken early this year, and the lab could be up and running in 2012.
Until then, rapists can have a free ride in the capital city.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected]
